


By And By, By And By

by AManAdrift



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Afterlife, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-21
Updated: 2017-08-21
Packaged: 2018-12-18 02:43:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11864976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AManAdrift/pseuds/AManAdrift
Summary: I wrote this as a response to a drabble by vakarian_shepard on Tumblr, and I'm archiving it here because finding anything older than a few days on Tumblr is Sisyphean.  I encourage you to check it out in conjunction with the drabble that prompted it, athttps://a-man-adrift.tumblr.com/post/164360605163/galpalaven-i-saw-art-of-thane-and-shepardThe post began “i saw art of thane and shepard meeting at the sea or whatever but now im just like. what if that’s how the afterlife is for everyone in mass effect”, so this drabble focuses on the afterlife of the family my main OC Phil Shepard lost on Mindoir: his parents Nathan and Teresa and (peripherally) his sister Jennifer.Note that the tag "Afterlife" refers to, um,theafterlife, not the nightclub on Omega.  The chances of my writing a story that will need a tag referring to that place are approximately nil!





	By And By, By And By

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galpalaven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galpalaven/gifts).



Once, while nobody was around, Nate Shepard tried to take the grill apart. It was mid-morning, Terri and Jen were enjoying a game of volleyball with some friends, old and new, and his curiosity had got the better of him. His hands cramped and his face twisted in frustration as he wrenched the screws out of the frame with nothing but a butter-knife left over from breakfast, but finally he had the side-panel off, and he found… nothing.

Incredulously, he twisted a knob and pushed the button: with the cover of the thing open, he could see blue flames spring to life, even what he would have sworn was a spark from a piezoelectric pilot light, but they just hung there in space, merrily heating up the ridged cooking surface on top of the grill. He looked off to the side: Why even bother having a gas tank, then? he wondered irritably. Some questions have no answers, but some people are minded to ask them anyway.

He flung the panel to one side, certain—or at any rate shrewdly able to guess—that it would be demurely back in place by lunch, and went to watch as Jen flirted shamelessly with what seemed like all four of the Marines they’d found washed up one day. _My daughter’s going to be a teenager until the end of time,_ he groused inwardly, even as he knew it hardly mattered. It was rare that anyone here felt an inclination to do more than a bit of harmless flirting—if they ever did they were almost always taking care of unfinished business from… before.

Nate was frustrated for now, but he was a stubborn sort: he couldn’t look at the palm trees without wishing he’d learned more about different kinds of wood, nor see the elaborate cutlery that appeared out of nowhere with every meal, without wanting to hammer and reshape it into axe and adze, nails and whatever else he needed. He wanted to build a boat and by God send Jennifer back to the life she deserved to have, and if it might take an eternity to figure out how, well, he just happened to have one to spare.

Teresa Shepard eyed the dissatisfied look on her husband’s face, and hid a smile: Nate was the sort to throw away the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow because it was the wrong shape. God kept them from the passions that cause men and women to make themselves unhappy here, but not even He could take away Nathan’s love for his family, or his way of always looking at the world as though it were a problem to be solved, without making him someone other than the man she loved. She would have liked to stay in the world longer, long enough at least to see her children find their own places and happiness in it, but as she plumped herself down in the sand next to her husband and felt his arm steal around her waist as it always did, she was glad they had arrived together.


End file.
